Haiku-Driven Development
Using Ritual and Ceremony to Sustain Agility and Stave Off Process Fatigue
Process gets boring.
How do we keep it fresh?
Tune up process.
Jean Tabaka
Who wants to be part of a “Scrum engine”?
“I Don’t Like Mondays”
(Agile 2007 talk)
Process doesn’t sustain itself.
Ritual punctuates process.
Ceremony sustains process.
Tradition builds community.
Ritual
customary observance or practice
Punctuation
clarifies meaning by separating
Ceremony
formal event performed on special occasion
Tradition
specific practice of long standing
Ritual.
Team wanted to track.
Team forgot to track.
“We keep forgetting to record our start time.”
Ideas hide in jokes.
“What if you wrote a haiku?”
Hee-hee!
Later that same day...
Devs wrote a haiku on the story card...
(after researching forms of Japanese poetry)
When a story was complete...
...everyone wanted to hear the haiku.
Reading the haiku marked progress in the iteration.
Later that iteration...
More tasks with tracked time.
Guess what?
CEO started coming to standups...
...to hear the haikus for the completed stories!
(...and accidentally kept up on progress.)
Why did this work?
Planning and tracking is boring.
Poetry is interesting.
Rituals root process.
Punctuation.
Iterations were two-week timeboxes.
Black boxes.
The team wanted to connect.
Commencement chime!
Completion frog.
Development rhythm.
Ding!
Talking-talking- talking.
Baruuuupp!
Repeat until done.
Ceremony.
Planning Game.
Planning Meeting.
Estimate, shuffle, negotiate, choose.
Ends
not with a bang
but a whimper.
A stack of cards.
Presentation.
“I have in my hand...”
Zen stories.
Always “strangely appropriate.”
Why did this work?
Endings need marking.
Or celebration.
Tradition.
Putting the “a” in team.
Painful planning meeting.
“Free drinks!”
Everyone showed up.
Next planning meeting...
“So, what time are we drinking?”
“When do you want to start?”
Why did this work?
You’ve got me.
But it did!
Time after time.
Happy accident.
Inject whimsy?
Discover whimsy.
Discover delight.
Can’t force it.
Don’t force it.
Roll around in it.
Listen.
Capture.
Evolve.
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